COLLEGES IN CRISIS ON RACE CRITERIA; STANDARD TESTS WIDELY CRITICIZED.

Byline: Ethan Bronner The New York Times

Universities around the United States are facing an agonizing dilemma: If they retain their affirmative action admissions policies, they face growing legal and political challenges, but if they move to greater reliance on standardized tests, the result will be a return to virtual racial segregation.

Test scores by African-American and Latino students remain stubbornly below those of whites. This phenomenon, which cuts across all income groups, is only now being widely studied, with several scholarly reports offering new explanations for it.

At the same time, longtime critics of standardized tests are finding wider sympathy for their argument that the tests are misguided. New data suggest that Scholastic Assessment Test scores and their professional-school equivalents are weak predictors of academic and career success.

Still, admission officials say that much as they would love to rely more on nuanced measures like essays and interviews, the pressures to use test scores are growing from the sheer volume of applicants, limited budgets for evaluating them and the rise of college-ranking guides that emphasize test scores.

Many officials agree with Donald Stewart, president of the College Board, who says the risk of increased reliance on standardized tests is ``simply the resegregation of higher education.''

``We're looking at a potential wipeout that could take away an entire generation,'' Stewart said. ``The social cost of that would be too high. America can't stand that.''

Concerns over standardized tests are as old as the tests themselves. But with the nation's two most populous states, California and Texas, now forbidden to use race in university admissions, and with similar bans anticipated elsewhere, those concerns have become central to the searing national debate over race relations.

In the past few months:

The Texas Legislature has ordered the University of Texas system to accept all students who graduate in the top 10 percent of their class irrespective of their SAT scores.

The Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund has filed a lawsuit against the state of Texas, saying its high school graduation examination, on which African-American and Mexican-American students fail at a much higher rate than non-Latino whites, is discriminatory.

The University of California has set up a commission to consider whether to drop or reduce the importance of SATs and is increasing its budget for reaching out to members of minorities.

The American Bar Association and the Law School Admission Council have begun a study intended to find ways to reduce reliance on the Law School Admission Test across the country.

The Educational Testing Service of Princeton, N.J., which administers many of the country's standardized tests, has grown defensive. It issued a lengthy statement warning against overreliance on the tests and urging that many measures of merit be simultaneously used.

``Equating scores with merit,'' the ETS said, ``supports a mythology that is not consistent with the reality of data.''

Why the gap?

The issue of race and merit is freighted with emotional and political baggage, as was made clear when Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray published ``The Bell Curve'' (The Free Press, 1994), a best seller asserting that the likeliest explanation for the gap in scores is genetic.

Most of the discussion since then has been an effort to discredit the book's explanation - widely criticized as racist - in favor of socioeconomic, psychological, historic and cultural ones. The legal and popular attacks on affirmative action have only added to the sense of urgency on the topic in the scholarly literature.

American Psychologist, the premier journal in its field, published by the American Psychological Association, has dealt with aspects of it in nearly every issue of the past half-year, with titles like ``Schooling, Intelligence and Income'' and ``A Threat in the Air: How Stereotypes Shape Intellectual Identity and Performance.''

Change magazine, largely read by administrators in higher education, devoted seven pages in its March-April issue to the article ``Standardized Testing: Meritocracy's Crooked Yardstick,'' and The Chronicle of Higher Education, a weekly publication, has been running frequent news and opinion pieces on the subject.

Affirmative action

The gap in scores between non-Latino white students and African-American and Latino students tracks across all tests, from IQ to achievement tests. It narrowed in the 1970s and '80s but has remained steady in the past decade.

The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, arguing that ``African-Americans are struggling to overcome 200 years of white supremacy and educational segregation'' and therefore need affirmative action to progress, included in its most recent issue a comparison between white and African-American scores on the SAT, ACT, LSAT and MCAT, the Medical College Admission Test. The article sought to show that a reliance on such scores would prove devastating to African-Americans.

Among the data cited was that the median combined MCAT score for whites rejected for admission to medical schools nationwide in 1996 - 25.2 out of 30 - was significantly higher than the median score for African-Americans (23.5) who were admitted.

In addition, the article pointed out that while African-Americans make up 10 percent of the more than 1.1 million high school seniors who took the SAT, they constituted only 1 percent to 2 percent of those scoring in the range required by many of the nation's elite universities.

Only 659 of the 110,000 college-bound African-American seniors who took the SAT scored above 700 out of a possible 800 on the math part, and only 900 scored above 700 on the verbal section. Nationally, 62,517 students scored above 700 on the math part and 52,835 scored above it on the verbal part.

Not a sure indicator

The gap, the study argued, means little about the potential for African-American achievement, and the authors cited an arresting example from history.

In 1951, Martin Luther King Jr. took the Graduate Record Exam for admission to a doctoral program at Boston University. The verbal-aptitude score of a man who is now viewed as among the nation's greatest orators ever was in the third quartile, or below average.

The journal said that if tests were used as the main measure of potential by admissions committees at the nation's top colleges and universities, ``black enrollments at these institutions will drop by at least one-half and in many cases by as much as 80 percent.''

A study published by the New York University Law Review in April makes a similar point for law schools. It concluded that if they were to apply to African-Americans a formula for admissions based on LSAT score plus grade-point average typically used as a cutoff for whites, the percentage of African-American applicants admitted across the country would fall to about 3 percent from the current 26 percent.